Background: Statistical analyses should be implemented by writing good-quality code in a professional statistical package, such as R (R Project for Statistical Computing), SAS (SAS Institute), or Stata (StataCorp). Good code ensures reproducibility, reduces error, and provides auditable documentation of the analyses underpinning research results. Efforts have recently been made to encourage archiving of code corresponding to published papers (1–5) on the grounds that doing so improves transparency. These efforts have focused on such areas as neuroscience or bioinformatics, which are highly dependent on computationally intensive analyses.

Objective: To examine how often authors used statistical code for clinical research papers published in a high-impact specialty journal and determine the quality of this code.